ALPHEUS CROSBY "SECOND ADVENT: OR, WHAT DO THE SCRIPTURES TEACH RESPECTING THE SECOND COMING OF CHRIST, THE END OF THE WORLD, THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD, AND THE GENERAL JUDGMENT?" ; 1850
"That, as the first coming of Christ was in humiliation, to labor and suffer, so his second coming would be in glory, to establish his kingdom UPON THE EARTH, and reign with his saints : that as he came the first time as a sacrifice and as servant of all, so he would come the second time as King of kings, introducing an entirely new age, raising the dead, changing the living, taking account of all past actions, rewarding his friends, punishing his enemies, and establishing a new and UNIVERSAL empire of transcendent' glory."
"Deny our proposition, and you make many of their words enigmas, and much of their history a riddle. Admit it, and you have a key of wondrous power to unlock the secrets of their views and feelings, of their language and their lives."
"Whether we suppose his predictions to have had two or twenty senses, whether he spoke of two comings or two hundred, did not the comprehensive words " all these things " (or " all," according to Luke) include the whole ? Were these words mere cobwebs, that caught the minor events, but suffered the great ones to break through ? I see therefore no way of avoiding the conclusion, that our Saviour expressly and most solemnly declared, just before his death, that the generation then upon the earth would not pass away, before the grand event of his Second Coming. " Page 53
"The events, therefore, which, according to the declarations of the Saviour and the expectations of the Apostles, were to be' fulfilled before that generation should pass away, must have long since taken place. No prediction of our Saviour can have failed of its fulfilment within the predicted time ; and any expectation of its fulfilment out of this time, unless ignorantly entertained, must be a presumptuous questioning either of his knowledge or of his veracity."
